“Electronic registers” find wide application across a broad range of industries, including the utility industries, where electronic registers provide critical metering capabilities for gas, electric, water, or other consumables provided on a metered basis. Electronic registers provide a ready mechanism for logging consumption data and, more generally, various types of sensor data, such as fluid level measurements, etc.
With their flexibility and wide usage, however, comes a number of challenges. For example, the designers, manufacturers, and distributors of electronic registers have a keen interest in reducing production costs, maintenance, and support issues, and simplifying the models that need to be stocked, serviced, etc. Customers, on the other hand, require electronic registers that are, in at least some respects, fine-tuned to their particular applications or installations. Difficulties, therefore, arise when attempting to field a base register design that accommodates a wide range of applications, while offering needed features and particularized operation suiting specific applications.
To appreciate some of these difficulties, consider the example components of a typical electronic register. In an exemplary but non-limiting case, an electronic register includes processing circuitry, communication circuitry, and sensor interface circuitry. However, the processing details and, in particular, the processing and logging of the sensor data, depends on the type of sensors and sensor data involved. The various aspects of data handling, such as resolution, scaling, etc., must be preprogrammed or otherwise provisioned in the electronic register before field deployment, which complicates production, distribution, inventory management, installation management, etc.